Europe’s Been Negotiating by the Book, but Trump’s Tearing It Up

 

News Analysis

Europe’s Been Negotiating by the Book, but Trump’s Tearing It Up

 

The Trump administration sees tariff talks as a chance to pressure a rival into concessions. E.U. officials have acted as though they were dealing with an ally.

 

Jeanna Smialek

By Jeanna Smialek

Reporting from Brussels and Paris

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/24/world/europe/europe-trade-trump-50-percent-threat.html

May 24, 2025

 

The European Union has been following tried-and-true rules of global commerce as it tries to negotiate with the Trump administration to avert painful tariffs on cars, pharmaceuticals and just about everything else.

 

The problem? President Trump is ripping up that rule book.

 

Mr. Trump announced in a Truth Social post on Friday morning that he is recommending a 50 percent tariff on European imports as of June 1, claiming that the bloc’s trade barriers, taxes, corporate penalties and other policies had contributed to a trade imbalance with the United States that was “totally unacceptable.”

 

“The European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of taking advantage of the United States on TRADE, has been very difficult to deal with,” Mr. Trump wrote, adding, “Our discussions with them are going nowhere!”

 

The surprise announcement comes after months of back-and-forth talks between the two enormous economies that have made, as Mr. Trump suggested, limited headway.

 

European officials have approached negotiations as though they are reasoning with an ally. But they have met with a Trump administration that sees this less as a chance for two geopolitical friends to seek a mutually beneficial solution — and rather as an opportunity to pressure a commercial rival into making concessions.

 

Mr. Trump has imposed round after round of tariffs on the 27-nation economic bloc and the world since taking office in January. He has hit sectors like steel and aluminum and cars with specific tariffs, while also threatening to place higher across-the-board levies on most American trading partners. But back in April, he announced that he would pause that latter category for a 90-day period as countries negotiated deals.

 

The president’s announcement, if implemented, would not only hit the European Union with those across-the-board tariffs before the end of that planned negotiating period, it would also more than double the rate the bloc expected.

 

In talks, the bloc’s policymakers have suggested what they have billed as win-win solutions, including a plan to drop tariffs on industrial products to zero and buying more American gas.

 

But American negotiators have been looking for one-way offers, diplomats, officials and people familiar with the negotiations have said, and White House officials themselves have implied this is not a give and take. It is just a take.

 

“I believe the president believes that the E.U. proposals have not been of the same quality that we’ve seen from our other important trading partners,” Scott Bessent, the U.S. Treasury secretary, said on Fox News on Friday.

 

Tariffs are only one arena in which the United States has been overhauling its relationship with Europe, which has for generations ranked among America’s closest allies.

 

Mr. Trump has taken verbal shots at Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, while pulling back from full-throated support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. He has insisted that America will no longer foot the bill for Europe’s security, and has even suggested that it might not come to the support of NATO members that he says are not chipping in enough for their own defense.

 

As Mr. Trump remolds the basic contours of the U.S.-Europe relationship, he is pressuring the bloc to make several trade-related changes that E.U. officials are unwilling to even consider.

 

Administration officials have also come after Europe for its regulation of digital services and social media companies — also policies that European officials have been unwilling to reconsider.

 

But unlike smaller economies like Britain, which has already struck a deal with the Trump administration, the European Union has a big enough trading relationship with the United States that its officials have believed that they had some amount of leverage.

 

Europe’s trading relationship with the United States is the largest in the world, by some measures. Nearly $5 billion in goods and services cross the Atlantic between the two partners every single day, by E.U. estimates. And while Europe sells America more goods than it buys — the goods trade deficit was about $180 billion in 2023 — it purchases more American services than it sells back.

 

Maros Sefcovic, the E.U. trade commissioner, and his colleagues have traveled repeatedly to Washington to talk with Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, and Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative.

 

Mr. Sefcovic talked to his counterparts in the United States on Friday after Mr. Trump’s threat, and posted on social media afterward that “EU-US trade is unmatched & must be guided by mutual respect, not threats. We stand ready to defend our interests.”

 

Besides making offers, European officials have also prepared two waves of countermeasures that would hit American goods coming into Europe with higher tariffs if no deal is reached. The second set of countertariffs — which would target 95 billion euros-worth of American goods that could range from bourbon to soybeans — is still being refined.

 

Neither Europe’s offers nor its threats have been greeted warmly by the administration.

 

“There are some countries that are impossible, like the European Union,” Mr. Lutnick said at an Axios event earlier this week.

 

Analysts in Washington and Brussels said on Friday that they viewed the 50 percent tariff as a negotiating tactic. But how the feud might resolve was unclear.

 

“There is some serious daylight between the E.U.’s expectations of what it can achieve in these talks and what the U.S. administration is willing to give,” said Jörn Fleck, senior director with the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington.

 

If 50 percent tariffs were to actually take effect and last, they would be crushing for the bloc. The European Union currently faces 10 percent across-the-board tariffs on its exports, like other nations. After the 90-day pause expires in July, the bloc was expecting to face 20 percent tariffs, based on what the United States had previously announced.

 

European officials have been holding out hope that tariffs would instead return to something like what had prevailed before this year, a reduction from even the current 10 percent rate. But that is not what Mr. Trump’s team is currently offering.

 

“The president will decide if they’ve made us an offer worthy of modifying their tariff terms,” Mr. Lutnick said earlier this week. “If they haven’t made us an offer that modifies it, the president will write them a letter saying, ‘Dear country A, we deeply appreciate doing business with you. Here’s your tariff rate.’”

 

And, he said, “there will be no floor below 10.”

 

Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin and Ana Swanson from Washington.

 

Jeanna Smialek is the Brussels bureau chief for The Times.